What do you think?
Rate this book
The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture
How did the Bible survive the Enlightenment? In this book, Jonathan Sheehan shows how Protestant translators and scholars in the eighteenth century transformed the Bible from a book justified by theology to one justified by culture. In doing so, the Bible was made into the cornerstone of Western heritage and invested with meaning, authority, and significance even for a secular age.
The Enlightenment Bible offers a new history of the Bible in the century of its greatest crisis and, in turn, a new vision of this century and its effects on religion. Although the Enlightenment has long symbolized the corrosive effects of modernity on religion, Sheehan shows how the Bible survived, and even thrived in this cradle of ostensible secularization. Indeed, in eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, biblical scholarship and translation became more vigorous and culturally significant than at any time since the Reformation. From across the theological spectrum, European scholars--especially German and English--exerted tremendous energies to rejuvenate the Bible, reinterpret its meaning, and reinvest it with new authority.
Poets, pedagogues, philosophers, literary critics, philologists, and historians together built a post-theological Bible, a monument for a new religious era. These literati forged the Bible into a cultural text, transforming the theological core of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the end, the Enlightenment gave the Bible the power to endure the corrosive effects of modernity, not as a theological text but as the foundation of Western culture.
The Enlightenment Bible offers a new history of the Bible in the century of its greatest crisis and, in turn, a new vision of this century and its effects on religion. Although the Enlightenment has long symbolized the corrosive effects of modernity on religion, Sheehan shows how the Bible survived, and even thrived in this cradle of ostensible secularization. Indeed, in eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, biblical scholarship and translation became more vigorous and culturally significant than at any time since the Reformation. From across the theological spectrum, European scholars--especially German and English--exerted tremendous energies to rejuvenate the Bible, reinterpret its meaning, and reinvest it with new authority.
Poets, pedagogues, philosophers, literary critics, philologists, and historians together built a post-theological Bible, a monument for a new religious era. These literati forged the Bible into a cultural text, transforming the theological core of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the end, the Enlightenment gave the Bible the power to endure the corrosive effects of modernity, not as a theological text but as the foundation of Western culture.
296 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 2005
2 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 18, 2026
Super interesting. Sheehan tracks how, in the eighteenth century (during the Enlightenment), the Bible was transformed from a self-legitimating theological text (worthy to be read because it offered divine revelation) to a fundamentally cultural work (worthy to be read as a foundation of Western culture). This transformation, Sheehan argues, was not a process of "secularization", but the work of Christian scholars intent on making the Bible relevant for a post-theological modern world.
January 15, 2017
This is an outstanding work of intellectual history. It has everything you could want: wit, solid prose, scholarly insight, and a secure knowledge of a multilingual corpus. Sheehan does an excellent job, working within English and German Bible scholarship (and nascent literary criticism) to help explain how one moves from the early authorized vernacular Bibles (Luther in Germany and King James Bible in England) to the "cultural Bible" we now know and (complexly) love. He does not tell the story of those who reject that cultural Bible and does not treat the American experience, but these minor desiderata should in no way diminish the scholarly accomplishment and pure reading pleasure of this ebullient romp through the alpine valleys of Bible scholarship in the early modern to frankly modern period. Along the way Sheehan helps to support the framing of secularity that Taylor so powerfully advocated just a couple years later, of a fundamentally religious phenomenon internal to Latin Christianity.
December 7, 2024
Sheehan's book is a well-researched, engaging, and original study of the cultural transformation of the Bible during the Enlightenment and beyond, which has left its mark on Western education, politics, and law. His thesis purposefully avoids the pitfalls of over-generalized arguments about "gradual secularization," instead focusing on the religiously-motivated modifications of the Bible as a cultural artifact in German and English scholarship from the early eighteenth century and into the late-Victorian age. Sheehan argues that all of the efforts (by Christians) after the Reformation to produce definitive translations, commentaries, and critical editions of the Bible ended up producing wide-ranging effects that theologians and divines in the 1750s could have never predicted. Essentially, by separating the Bible from the Church and bringing it into the academy where it could be dissected, analyzed and measured with all of the new "tools" of modernity, the Bible ended by becoming non-divine, non-theological, and even - perhaps surprisingly - national. This is why there is a divide going back 200 years between "biblical studies" and Theology proper.
Along the way, Sheehan argues that there are four main arenas where this transformation from Word of God to cultural artifact occurred: philology, pedagogy, poetry, and history. The Germans picked up where the English left off in the mid-eighteenth century with philology, building on the ground-breaking scholarship of such men as Benjamin Kennicot and Robert Lowth, though quickly surpassing them (in such figures as Michaelis). This philological approach to the Bible viewed it as an ancient text to be examined, collated, and footnoted. It treated it not as a living document, but as a textual game. The pedagogical approach to the Bible witnessed a host of bizarre translations, far before the last century's "Living Bible" or this century's "Remix" version, all in the service of pedagogical reform of morals. The Bible became, in this schema, a practical book with "applications" to "modern life" in the areas of public morals, etc. The poetic approach, best illustrated by the work of J G Herder, again led to bifurcations: language from theology, ancient texts from modern life, etc. Poetically the Scriptures could be seen as contributing to the Israelite nation's deepest expressions, and constituting a kind of culturally revelatory document. The historical approach, which characterized Michaelis's almost incomprehensible scholarly feats, sought to make the Bible more foreign and less recognizable than ever before; far from being a book for one's own edification, it became a repository of all sorts of ancient, "oriental" arcane wisdom and practices. It was a corpse to be dissected and learned from, but from a strictly non-partisan, non-theological point of view.
Overall this is a magisterial treatment of the slow and unwitting transformation of how the West has regarded and used the Bible. Really for any literary or religious scholar of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as for all stripes of theologians, this will be a very helpful book.
Along the way, Sheehan argues that there are four main arenas where this transformation from Word of God to cultural artifact occurred: philology, pedagogy, poetry, and history. The Germans picked up where the English left off in the mid-eighteenth century with philology, building on the ground-breaking scholarship of such men as Benjamin Kennicot and Robert Lowth, though quickly surpassing them (in such figures as Michaelis). This philological approach to the Bible viewed it as an ancient text to be examined, collated, and footnoted. It treated it not as a living document, but as a textual game. The pedagogical approach to the Bible witnessed a host of bizarre translations, far before the last century's "Living Bible" or this century's "Remix" version, all in the service of pedagogical reform of morals. The Bible became, in this schema, a practical book with "applications" to "modern life" in the areas of public morals, etc. The poetic approach, best illustrated by the work of J G Herder, again led to bifurcations: language from theology, ancient texts from modern life, etc. Poetically the Scriptures could be seen as contributing to the Israelite nation's deepest expressions, and constituting a kind of culturally revelatory document. The historical approach, which characterized Michaelis's almost incomprehensible scholarly feats, sought to make the Bible more foreign and less recognizable than ever before; far from being a book for one's own edification, it became a repository of all sorts of ancient, "oriental" arcane wisdom and practices. It was a corpse to be dissected and learned from, but from a strictly non-partisan, non-theological point of view.
Overall this is a magisterial treatment of the slow and unwitting transformation of how the West has regarded and used the Bible. Really for any literary or religious scholar of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as for all stripes of theologians, this will be a very helpful book.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews